SOURCE: "An Ancient Mariner Tells a Haunting Modern Tale," in The New York Times, February 25, 1994, p. C29.

[In the following review, Kakutani provides a thematic analysis of Amnesia.]

Amnesia, Douglas Cooper's chilly, chilling first novel, is one of those books that immediately make you think of dozens of other books. Its allusive narrative is filled with explicit references to Frankenstein, The Sea Gull, Hamlet and the writings of Freud and Nietzsche, while its elliptical narrative style recalls works by D.M. Thomas, Paul Auster, Sam Shepard and Vladimir Nabokov. The framing story is borrowed from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As in that famous poem, a man on his way to a wedding (in this case, the groom himself) is button-holed by a stranger, who has a bizarre tale to tell; the tale will become both a private act of expiation and a public means of communicating...